Did Chris Klein Ruin John McTiernan's Life?
Reports that Die Hard/Predator/Last Action Hero hero John McTiernan entered a guilty plea for lying to the FBI about hiring Anthony Pellicano to wirtetap producer Charles Roven hit yesterday afternoon, but this morning's news cycle brings some more information about what went down in the courtroom. Says the LAT:
The terms of McTiernan's plea agreement were not released. But it is believed he will be a cooperating witness in the government's investigation. [...]
McTiernan admitted lying to the agent when he denied that Pellicano had ever told him of his ability to wiretap adversaries.
McTiernan said he also lied when he denied hiring Pellicano in a case unrelated to his own divorce, in which he employed the private eye to gather information on his ex-wife. "In fact, I had used Anthony to wiretap Charles Roven," McTiernan told the judge. "I had spoken with him about it. I never received a report or specific information. I paid him off and fired him. But I did not tell that to the agent on the phone."
Why McTiernan engaged Pellicano to wiretap Roven is unclear, although the two worked together in 2000 on the box office flop "Rollerball."
We may never know why the successful director hired Pellicano to eavesdrop on the producer, but our best guess is that McTiernan was shaken by watching a tag team of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Frankie Muniz stomp his sure-thing Chris Klein vehicle, and in his ensuing hunt for meaning in a suddenly chaotic world (after all, hadn't he killed Schwarzenegger's career with Last Action Hero? What else can one man do?), stumbled across some legal and ethical lines. Any of us might have done the same thing faced with such reality-rocking circumstances. We don't need to point out what Klein did to ex-finacee Katie Holmes' life, do we?
